Today's post is a brief history of paper... 


The history of paper stretches back millennia, right back to when we first started wanting to record things for posterity. When cave walls proved frustratingly unportable, the search was on for something else to write upon. The ancient Egyptians cut up plant stems to form papyrus, and the Chinese moved on from tablets of bamboo and pieces of silk to paper made from textile and plant fibers. By 875 AD they had even introduced toilet paper.

From the Far East the secrets of paper production made their way to the Islamic Middle East, and from there on to 12th century Europe where the medium of choice was the prohibitively expensive parchment. When a single copy of the bible required a quantity of parchment made from the skin of around 300 sheep, it's not hard to see where the money was going. Early European paper, by contrast, was made from old cotton and linen rags, bringing the price down significantly.

It's no coincidence that this is the time period in which we start to see awareness of literacy, if not literacy itself, begin to make its way down the social order. Out go depictions on church walls of the devil collecting sacks of sounds from inattentive and gossiping parishioners, and in come the images of demons noting down the names of sinners on scrolls. This appreciation of its importance led to increased demand for the written word and, by the mid fifteenth century, the printing press had also made the journey from the Far East to Western Europe.

This sketch from Norwegian show Øystein og meg deals with the transition from scroll to book...
Now the race was on to bring the cost of paper down still further. Production became increasingly mechanised, and the Fourdrinier brothers succeeded in perfecting a machine to produce paper in rolls, as opposed to sheets, in the early nineteenth century. In the 1840s the technique of making paper from wood pulp was perfected, coinciding with the invention of the steam powered rotary printing press. At the same time a method was found for the mass production of pencils, and stamp duty on newspapers in the UK was lifted in 1855, encouraging the growth of the popular press.

Fountain pens went into mass production in the 1880s, while the 1870 Education Act was constantly improved upon, making school attendance compulsory for all children aged between 5 and 13 in 1880. With an ever growing number of the population able to read and write, the demand for paper continued unabated. Today, according to The World Counts, 42% of all wood harvested is used for paper production. Just to put out one Sunday edition of the New York Times requires 75,000 trees to be pulped.

Paper recycling has been going on for centuries, with a method for removing ink from paper (deinking) to help the process developed in 1774. Initially this was about the cost of paper production, today such procedures are more about the environmental cost. Europe is now the world leader when it comes to paper recycling, and around 70% of consumed paper is sent off to be recycled. This desire to rely less on tree felling has also seen a reemergence of alternative paper sources.

Daffodil fragranced air freshener from www.sheeppoopaper.com.

My personal favourite is the rise of paper made from sterilised poo. The inspiration for this post was a piece on one such craft paper company in the local paper, and there are many out there. From the above pictured sheep poo paper, to reindeer poo paper, to fair trade elephant poo paper, there is no reason to send your friends (or enemies) missives on the remains of majestic trees. Send them on the droppings of cute animals instead!

It's amazing to think that photography - something so familiar and integral to our lives - has only been around for 200 years! Read on for a whistle stop tour of its history; from its labour intensive beginnings in home laboratories to the super swanky Lumix Super Zoom cameras of today. Photography is one medium which really has come a very long way...


18th century illustration of a camera obscura. The earliest written references to the camera obscura date back to the fifth century BC, and they were probably in use well before that. Not really a camera as we would understand it, they are, nevertheless, the granddaddy of modern photography. Consisting of a box (or room) with a small hole, often fitted with a lens since the seventeenth century, they work like so: Light passes through the hole, hits a surface, and reproduces the view in front of the hole - in colour and with the perspective intact.

That view can then be traced to produce realistic drawings or paintings. To better understand how it all works, check out this great article from the BBC on the likelihood of Dutch artist Vermeer having made extensive use of a camera obscura.

But what if you didn't want to spend hours making the camera obscura image permanent? What if you could make that image 'fix' itself? In the late 1700s, these are the questions people began to ask themselves.



Niépce was the first to succeed in this quest, temporarily fixing negative images to paper coated with silver chloride way back in 1816. In 1822 he succeeded in creating a permanent image using heliography, a process using plates of glass or metal coated in Bitumen of Judea. The oldest surviving camera photograph is the view from Niépce's window in 1826, a picture which required several days exposure.

What a view!
In 1829 Niépce began to work with Louis Daguerre. After Niépce's death in 1833, Daguerre carried on alone, going on to create the daguerreotype.



The above infographic by Susanna Castelli describes the somewhat arduous process of fixing an image to a thin sheet of silver plated copper, by producing a coating of silver iodide which made the plate light sensitive. The image was then fixed by exposure to mercury vapour, and a wash in heated salt water or sodium thiosulfate to remove any remaining silver iodide.

Daguerre was ready to go public with his invention in 1839, when it was purchased by the French government and given free to the world as a gift. Except the British Empire, where you needed to buy a license. (To be fair to the French, this was Daguerre's doing by taking out a UK patent.) The novelty of owning a perfect likeness ensured the system's success, and throughout the 1840s and 50s lords and paupers alike sat for a daguerreotype.

Robert Cornelius taking a daguerreotype selfie in 1839.
But the daguerreotype still had plenty of problems. The image was fragile, needing to be protected by a case or glass fronted frame, and copies could not be made, other than by photographing the original plate. This, along with the amount of light needed and the long exposure times, meant that experimentation for a better process was constantly ongoing. (Ambrotypes, for instance, were created using less expensive glass plates.) These efforts ensured that daguerreotypes had largely fallen out of use by 1860.


Cameras were changing too; the bellows camera arrived in 1847, making focusing easier.
In 1841 William Henry Fox Talbot introduced the calotype, a process using paper coated with silver iodide to create a negative. Multiple images could be produced from this single image, which should have given it the edge over the daguerreotype in spite of the fact the image was not as sharp. But Talbot's patenting of the process limited its development, and it wasn't until it was adapted to a glass negative in the early 1850s that it really proved its worth.

This new 'collodion process' combined the clear definition of the daguerreotype with the reproductive abilities of the calotype, improving on both with its cheapness and the durability of its negative. It was chiefly used to create tintypes (images on thin sheets of metal coated in lacquer or enamel) and albumen paper prints.

Longer exposure times meant sitting still was a necessity - resulting in poor mothers, like the one in this tintype image, having a blanket draped over their heads and holding their wriggly offspring, assured by the photographer that they would blend seamlessly into the background...
The collodion process could be done dry (with long exposure times) or wet (requiring a portable darkroom to complete everything in around ten minutes before the plate dried). Both methods had obvious pitfalls. Still, another breakthrough was just around the corner...


The iconic Box Brownie.
George Eastman patented the first practical roll film in 1884, perfected the first camera designed to use it in 1888, and began producing the kind of film we're familiar with today in 1889. The Eastman Kodak Company was established in 1892, and set about revolutionising what photography was all about.

For the first time you didn't need any experience to take a photograph. You didn't need vials of chemicals, or piles of expensive equipment. All you had to do was point the camera, press the button, and let somebody else transform your film into photographs. The Box Brownie, introduced in 1900, shifted 150,000 units in its first year of production alone.

So simple, even a child could operate it.
Photography had come to the masses.


Film was now the way forward, but there was no consensus on what size that film ought to be. 35 mm film - later known as 135 film after Kodak started producing it - was largely the result of the fledgling motion picture industry. Thomas Edison was using 70 mm Kodak film, cutting it in half and splicing it together. This newly standard 35 mm film then found its way into still cameras.

A number of cameras were produced with the 35 mm format specifically in mind, like the Tourist Multiple in 1913 and the Furet in 1923, but it was Leica which really became associated with it. Although a prototype had been completed in 1913, the Leica I only went into full production in 1925. Good things come to those who wait - the camera proved so successful that Ernst Leitz GmbH, then known for microscopes, binoculars and optical equipment, today bears the Leica name. 35 mm film became ever more popular too, becoming the best selling format by the 1960s.




The first SLR (single lens reflex) camera was actually invented by Thomas Sutton in 1861. The concept was tinkered with, improved upon, and finally emerged as a viable and attractive prospect. It really took off with the introduction of Nikon F in August 1959 - widely used by professional photographers, it offered plenty of optional add-ons and remained in production until 1973 when it was replaced by the Nikon F2.


Model 1000, an export only version of the Polaroid OneStep. With that retro rainbow stripe, it's a thing of beauty.
Instant cameras first hit the scene in 1923, but didn't become commercially available until the invention of the Polaroid Model 95 in 1948. The idea didn't really take off until the swinging sixties when the Model 20 'Swinger' swung onto the scene. (Too much swinging?) Easy to use, and relatively inexpensive, the Swinger became one of the best selling cameras of all time. Since the 60s the instant camera has enjoyed periodic bursts of popularity, appealing particularly to the youth and novelty markets.

Andy Warhol - the personification of pop art - was a big fan of the Polaroid.

They say that a tool is only ever as good as the human (or future robot overlord) which wields it. To help overcome human fallibility, new technology was being introduced to cameras that made taking photographs easier than ever. The Konica C35 AF became the first mass-produced camera with autofocus in 1977, something which by the late 1980s was becoming standard.

Flash photography was improving too. The concept had been around since the 1850s, using magnesium ribbon or flash powder used in special lamps. Reducing the risk of singed hair and burns, the single use flashbulb first went into commercial production in the late 1920s - in the 1930s they became triggered by the shutter. By 1970 you could get multiple bulbs in the same unit, making the process less labour intensive. It was the 1970s, too, which saw the electronic flash unit start to become affordable; it wasn't too long before it became the norm.


One of the most popular digital cameras of 2003 - the Olympus 300 boasted a resolution of 3.2 megapixels and a retail tag of almost $400.
Experiments with digital photography began in the 1960s: the first successful prototype digital camera took an image with a resolution of a whopping 0.01 megapixels in 1975. Analog electronic cameras trickled onto the market in the 1980s, and the first portable true digital camera to go into commercial production was the DS-X by Fuji - the year was 1989.

Hampered at first by low resolution, tiny storage space (relatively speaking!) and high costs, as technology improved during the 1990s so did sales of digital cameras. They outsold film cameras for the first time in 2003 - the same year that the sale of mobile phones equipped with digital cameras first outsold their standalone counterparts.

The first digital photograph - a digital scan of engineer Russell Kirsch's baby son in 1957.



Here we are in the present day, with the camera range which inspired this post - the Lumix Super Zoom Cameras. The pictured Lumix Communication Camera CM1 combines an android mobile phone with a 20 megapixel sensor and a Leica lens. It boasts LED flash, 16GB internal memory, 2.3GHz Quad-core processor, along with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. You can get it on Amazon for £379.

Just imagine what Niépce would have made of it, when he succeeded with those first temporary negatives 200 years ago!

Every day is a battle of wills in our house between myself, a person wanting a cup of tea, and Anthony, someone who doesn't want to go and make me that tea. I usually emerge triumphant, but it doesn't make the process any less nail biting!

In celebration of today's victory, here are ten cool (hot?) facts about tea:


#10. Brits drink 165 million cups of tea a day.

That's 60.2 billion a year as a nation, or around 876 cups each - enough to fill two bathtubs. Tea consumption has actually fallen a lot over the last few decades; your average Brit drank 23 cups of tea a week in 1973, compared to just 8 today. Coffee still has a lot of catching up to do though - as a nation we're only drinking 70 million cups of coffee a day. (If the figures don't quite add up, blame the fact I pulled them from different studies!)

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#9. But Turkey loves tea more.

In the UK we're consuming around 4.281 pounds of tea per person, per year. In Turkey that figure is 6.961 pounds. Morocco, Ireland, and Mauritania also consume more tea per head than the UK. Worldwide, tea is the second most consumed drink, after water.

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#8. Salt and ...Sugar?

The most common way to drink tea in the UK is with milk and two [teaspoonfuls of sugar]. But in some places salted tea is the way to go. Mongolia is famed for its milky suutei tsai, and it is common to take tea with salt across South Asia.

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#8. There are over 3,000 varieties of tea.

They come from the same basic type of plant, the Camellia Sinensis, and are divided into five basic categories: black, green, oolong, white, and puer. The vast majority of the tea consumed in the UK is black, meaning the leaves have been allowed to undergo full oxidation.

The tea corner in my 1/6 scale kitchen.

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#7. During WW2 tea was rationed.

In 1938 the UK accounted for half of all imports of black tea. Given the difficulty of importing goods after the outbreak of war, tea went on the ration in July 1940 at 2 oz per adult, per week. Rationing continued after the war but the weekly allowance was increased to 2.5 oz until dock strikes in Calcutta and Colombo in 1947 brought it back down to 2 oz. There was another brief increase to 2.5 oz between December 1949 and June 1950, then it remained at 2 oz until it was finally taken off ration in Octber 1952.

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#6. The teabag has been around since 1901.

Roberta C. Lawson and Mary Molaren of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, filed a US patent for a 'tea-leaf holder' made of an open-meshed woven cotton bag in 1901. It failed to take off and the tea bag's invention is usually claimed to be an accident - Thomas Sullivan, a New York tea merchant, was sending out tea samples in little silk bags. When customers started putting the bag straight in the pot, he realised he was on to something clever and switched to gauze bags. These, followed by paper bags, were in commercial production in the USA by the 1920s, and eventually crossed the pond as a futuristic seeming time saver introduced by Tetley in 1953. It took some getting used to: in the early 1960s teabags accounted for just 3% of British tea sales. Today around 96% of our tea comes in tea bags! (source)

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#5. Tea has been drunk since 1500 BC.

The practice originated in China where tea was drunk for medicinal purposes, and there is written evidence confirming tea drinking before the second century BC. From China the practice spread throughout the East, and was brought to the West by merchants in the 16th century. Tea reached the UK in the 1650s, and by 1750 had overtaken gin as the nation's favourite beverage, with imports quadrupling between 1720 and 1750 alone.

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#4. 'I'm a Little Teapot' isn't the only tea song.

Written by George Harold Sanders and Clarence Kelley in 1939, I'm a Little Teapot quickly became popular in its native USA as well as further afield. Tea for Two, a song from the musical No, No, Nanette, had already taken audiences by storm in 1925, and in the decades which followed everyone who was anyone recorded a song abut tea. From Jack Buchanan (Everything Stops For Tea, 1935) to The Kinks (Have a Cuppa Tea, 1971) to Nirvana (Pennyroyal Tea, 1993). My personal favourite is A Nice Cup of Tea (1937) by British songstress Binnie Hale:

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#3. Milk is a class issue.

I know, what in Britain isn't!? But starting with milk served a very practical purpose in the early days of British tea drinking - your imitation Chinese porcelain was liable to crack if the hot tea was poured in first. By putting your milk in last, you were telling the world that your porcelain was the real, incredibly expensively imported, deal. This made milk second the 'correct' way to make tea, and a sign you were a true member of the genteel classes. I've always made tea milk first, thus revealing my lower class origins.

PG Tips Monkey.

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#2. PG Tips is the UK's favourite brew.

But Twinings isn't far behind, selling itself as a premium - yet affordable - cuppa. Although their market share has really skyrocketed over the last decade or so, Twinings actually established the first known tea shop in the UK way back in 1706.

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#1. Tea has more caffeine than coffee.

But only in its dry form. Smaller quantities of tea are used to brew however, and once prepared a cup of tea in the UK contains an average of 40 mg of caffeine per cup vs. 105 mg in a cup of coffee. (More info at 'Is Coffee Really The Most Caffeinated Drink?') For a truly caffeine free cuppa, switch to herbal teas which are made from different plants. (source: 1 - 2)


How do you take your tea?

March 8th is International Women's Day - sometimes known as International Working Women's Day - and is celebrated in various countries with flowers, chocolates, presents, and even public holidays. In China, for example, female employees typically get a half day holiday. In the UK IWD is mostly about newspaper articles and a cool Google Doodle, though there were commemorative events across the country, such as an equal rights march in central London.

My contribution is a post celebrating the life of a rather unsung heroine:

L. T. Meade

My first encounter with Meade.

I first stumbled across Marjorie Benton Cooke through my innate cheapskateness - I was looking for something to read on Kindle, and her 1914 novel 'Bambi' popped up. I gave it a whirl and was instantly enchanted because I love contemporary romance, providing that it was contemporary before 1930.

Quote from Bambi, 1914.
Since then I've really enjoyed working my way through her bibliography. She uses so many of my favourite tropes - the marriage of convenience blossoming into real love, and having characters from one book pop up in another, so that her whole literary universe is interconnected - and her writing is still fresh and amusing. My absolute favourite is The Cricket (1919) which never fails to make me laugh, cry, and dream up a thousand different scenarios for what happened after the final page was done with. We'll never know for real because Cooke had no chance to write a sequel; she passed away on April 26th 1920, aged just 43, after contracting pneumonia while on a world cruise with her mother.

The thing about The Cricket is that it tackles themes most authors would be leery of today, let alone almost a century ago. Take this discussion between Isabelle's (AKA the Cricket) parents on her fourth birthday:

"Look here, Wally, don’t begin on that mother stuff. I didn’t want her any more than you did, and we were fools to have her. That may be abnormal, unnatural, and all the rest of it, but it’s the truth, and there are lots of other women just like me. You can’t lump us, any more than you can lump men. We don’t all of us have the maternal instinct, not by a long shot."

"Don’t talk like that, Max; it’s not nice."

"There you go. It’s all right for you not to want a child, but it’s indecent in me. That’s a man-made idea, and it won’t work any more. Lots of us don’t find motherhood either satisfying or interesting, and we’re getting courage enough to say so."

Because beneath all the lighthearted comedy and the sentimentality, The Cricket explores a powerful message. Not all women want children, and if they don't it only does everyone more harm than good to push them into motherhood. For instance, there's a real tear jerky scene where we learn that Isabelle, even at the age of 16, writes weekly letters to her imaginary 'regular parents' - a coping mechanism she used in the nursery - who love and cherish her in a way her own simply aren't capable of.

Benton Cooke herself never married or had children. She was born 17th November 1876 to salesman and one time Richmond city treasurer, Joseph Henry and his wife Jessie Benton Cooke. She attended prep schools in Detroit and Chicago before studying at the University of Chicago. Marjorie was very active in university life - her name is all over the relevant editions of The Cap and Gown, the university year book, winning prizes and scholarships, writing and performing in dramatic productions, and sitting on various committees. (1896, 1898, 1899, 1900) Even after graduating in 1899 with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree she served as second vice-president of the Alumni Association.


There are various photos in the yearbooks of groups containing Marjorie but, annoyingly, they aren't matched up properly with names. I'm inclined to say she was the tall girl in the back row, just because to my untrained eye she looks most like Marjorie's younger brother Edson! Here he is in 1901, wearing his University of Chicago football kit - you can also see him in the full team photo, he's the last guy on the right in the back row.

In the years after graduating Marjorie began to carve out a niche for herself as a literary humourist, becoming famed for her witty monologues (e.g. Modern Monologues, 1903 and More Modern Monologues, 1907) and as a supporter of the women's suffrage movement. She wrote plays for schoolgirls and amateur dramatists, song lyrics, verse, and short stories for magazines and newspapers (e.g. The Evening Story in The Duluth Evening Herald, 1906). Finally in 1910 her first novel The Girl Who Lived in the Woods was published, a story which would later be adapted into the now lost silent film The Little 'Fraid Lady, released in December 1920 and starring Mae Marsh.

Success did nothing to slow her output down. In 1912 she wrote her first film scenario, becoming the short Her Educator for the Selig Polyscope Company, who also produced her The Story of Lavinia in 1913.  Her most famous book, Bambi, was released in 1914 and received largely positive reviews, one of my favourites being 'absurd, but vivacious'.

Bambi was illustrated by Mary Sheppard Greene, who also illustrated later MBC novels, like The Dual Alliance.
Bambi was followed up by The Dual Alliance in 1915, the tale of a successful actress who marries her accountant and helps him in his campaign to be elected mayor, as an alternative to committing suicide out of sheer tedium. Another 1915 novel was The Incubus, which was later adapted for the screen as Her Husband's Friend - a light rom-com, the film did well for Paramount Pictures on its release in November 1920.

In her spare time, according to her Woman's Who's Who of America entry, Marjorie enjoyed tennis, gold and theatre. She was a member of the Women's University Club in New York, the City Club of Chicago, and The Little Room. (Not quite sure what that one was!)

1917 was a good year, with the publication of Cinderella Jane - a fake marriage between a painter and a want-to-be writer slowly morphs into the real deal - and the release of another Selig short based on one of her scenarios, Cupid's Touchdown, starring the nation's favourite ne'er-do-well, Jack Pickford. Also in 1917 Marjorie contributed a chapter to the round robin novel, The Sturdy Oak, along with a whole host of up and coming American writers including Alice Duer Miller and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.


1918 saw the publication of The Threshold and The Clutch of Circumstance. The British press were critical of the latter, bemoaning its Americanisms, as in THIS review from Y Llan on 19th December 1919. It was followed up in 1919 by The Cricket, and the National Film Corporation of America released The Love Call, based on one of her stories. At the end of the year Marjorie and her mother Jessie set off on a world cruise. Her obiturary in Variety magazine said that her home address at this time was 102 East 52d street, New York.

In the months and years which immediately followed her death her work continued to be popular. 1920 saw two film adaptions of her novels, and in 1921 Universal turned Cinderella Jane into The Mad Marriage. Sadly the film is believed to be lost - in fact, the only extant film based on Marjorie's work appears to be Married?, a 1926 comedy. Bambi was adapted for the radio in 1936, with actress Helen Hayes playing the titular role.

Today she is all but forgotten, but hopefully this little blog post will in some way help to rectify that.

The Wasp, 1920.

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1903
☆ Modern Monologues.

1904
☆ Prince Lovingheart.

1905
☆ Is Yo? Yo' Is!.

1906
☆ Tit For Tat.

1907
☆ More Modern Monologues.

1908

1909

1910

1911
☆ To Mother.

As regular visitors will know, I spend way too much time reading true crime, and one of the creepiest elements to my mind are people who remain unidentified in death. The reasons might be mundane - the body is simply found too late to glean much from it - or confusingly complex, as in the cases of potential spies, like Somerton Man and 'Bella', a woman found inside a Worcestershire wych elm tree in 1943. Either way, the idea is still tragic and unsettling.

In the USA there are approximately 40,000 UIDs ('unidentified decedents') at any given time, and even here in the UK around 150 unidentified bodies are recorded each year, usually discovered by joggers, dog walkers, and other outdoorsy types, typically during the winter months when foliage has died back. Another major source of such bodies are Britain's coastlines, where the effects of water can obliterate fingerprints and other identifying features. About half of these cases will be resolved by police in a timely fashion, while others remain unidentified for months, years, even decades.

Gwent Police, my local force, covering the local authority areas of Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly Monmouthshire, Newport, and Torfaen, have five cases listed on the UK Missing Persons Bureau. The site was set up in 2011 to enlist the help of the public in identifying remains and / or matching them to known missing persons.

Because it is possible to crack these cases, even when they've gone cold. Just this month Lori Erica Ruff, a woman who committed suicide six years ago and was subsequently revealed to have been living under a false identity, was identified as Kimberly McLean, an 18-year-old who disappeared, telling family not to look for her, in 1986. Earlier this year the so-called 'Grateful Doe', a young man who died in a traffic accident in 1995, was finally identified as Jason Callahan who had left home not long before to become a full time Deadhead. So, in my first post for Halloween week, here are the details of those five Gwent cases -


Date Found: 31/03/1971
Gender: Male
Age Range: 25 - 35
Description: White European male, medium build, 175cm (5'7") tall, with black curly hair. The body was found on the foreshore of the Severn Esturary, Fisherman's Walk, Rogiet, and was believed to have been in the water for 18 months or longer.

The body was found with one black sock on the right foot, and a polo neck jumper in black, gold and white. (100% acrilan, 'spinney' make, size M.) Find the Missing Person's page for the case HERE.


Date Found: 06/05/1973
Gender: Male
Age Range: 30 - 60
Description: White European male, 168 - 183cm (5'5" - 6') tall. The body was recovered from the foreshore of the Bristol Channel at Goldcliffe, and was believed to have been in the water for around 9 to 18 months. Find the Missing Person's page for the case HERE.


Date Found: 26/02/1977
Gender: Male
Age Range: 20 - 50
Description: White European male, thin build, 183cm (6') tall, receding black hair. The body was recovered from the Severn Estuary at Redwick. It was found clothed in blue jeans (30" waistband with 2 stud fastenings at the front), light coloured socks, and black slip on shoes (size 9, blvd uk make). A handmade v-neck light grey jumper was found 10 yards from the body.

There were a number of possessions found on the body: brown leather wallet made in England containing English bank notes, two mortice keys (one Yale marked C20 and one Yale Willen 160), Dominion Lock, and a pair of scissors. Find the Missing Person's page for the case HERE.

Sketch included on the case page.

Date Found: 06/07/1983
Gender: Male
Age Range: 35 - 45
Description: White European, medium build, 173cm (5'7") tall, brown eyes, greying light brown hair. The body was recovered from the River Usk in Newport, with no apparent marks or scars.

The body was fully clothed; navy blue acrylic 'sleightex' sweater, blue or grey 'finesse' make trousers, blue 'St Michael (i.e. Marks & Spencer)' underpants (size 36-39), white socks with blue and yellow horizontal stripes, brown plastic shoes with 'tuf' tread (size 7.5). Find the Missing Person's page for the case HERE.


Date Found: 14/02/1988
Gender: Male
Age Range: 20 - 30
Description: Afro Caribbean male, stocky build, 183cm (6') tall, short black hair. The body was found in the Bristol Channel near Newport.

The body was fully clothed, wearing: navy blue donkey jacket with blue/green check lining ('boys own' make, size M), grey/blue scarf, olive green crew neck jumper in chunky woollen knit, brown checked shirt (Tesco, size L), grey t-shirt ('amandla' with motif of raised fist holding spear and the words 'cultural ensemble of the national african congress'), faded blue Wrangler jeans (36" waist, 34" leg), brown belt, Dunlop 'green flash' trainers (size 9).

There was also a pair of polyester/cotton shell acrylic gloves with rayon/foam lining, size L, and an A-Z street map opened on pages marking Bristol but showing the area of Cheltenham. Find the Missing Person's page for the case HERE.

Visual cues: Green Flash Daps, Amandla logo, 1980s A-Z Street Atlas.
(Note: Although the body was found in the Gwent Police area, the case is listed as being investigated by South Wales Police.)

You know how when you're a kid there's always a story about a scary murder that took place in your neighbourhood? Well, for many years I just wrote ours off as just that. Except it turns out that the murder was very, very real. So real the murderer was hanged for the deed in December 1948.

Here's the full story -

Clifford Godfrey Wills was born in 1916, the son of housewife Edith Marion Dunn and Thomas H Wills, a marine engine fitter. The couple had married in 1914 and at the outbreak of WWII were living in a semi-detached house in lower Pontnweydd. Wills served in the army and then, after being demobbed in 1945, returned to live with his mother at 3 Cromwell Place.

An electrician by trade, Wills was unemployed more often than not, but made up for it by being attractive and charming. It wasn't long after leaving service that Wills began an affair with (among others) Sylvina Parry, a married woman who was friendly with his mother and lived just a few doors away at 11 Wayfield Crescent.

'Viney', as she was known to family and friends, had been born Sylvina May Jones on January 9th, 1916. In 1933 she married John Parry, a furnace man at the GKN (Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds) Ironworks in Cwmbran, and a year later gave birth to their son, Anthony. Standing at just 5'2", Sylvina was said to be a happy, likeable woman, who was always chatty and telling funny stories with work colleagues, even if she tended to be reserved with her neighbours.

Tragedy

Tuesday 8th June was to be a big day for Sylvina - she was due to take delivery of a brand new car in Newport. Up at the normal time of 6:45 am, Sylvina left her home at the regular time of 7:30 am to get to her job as a machine operator at the Caldicot Tin Stamping Works. She spoke to neighbours also on their way to work, and to a colleague who took her a light meal just after midday, as usual. Sylvina had already arranged with management to leave work early that day to go and pick up the car, and left the premises at about 2pm.

[Disclaimer: I've only seen the claim she was getting a new car in one source, the 2014 Citizen Record article.]


For her husband, John, that Tuesday seemed to be just another working day. He left the house shortly before 2pm to get to his shift at GKN. When he returned home at 10:15 pm he was unnerved to find that, although 14-year-old Anthony was home, his wife was nowhere to be seen. John and Anthony sat up late waiting for her, and periodically John wandered the neighbourhood looking for her. There were plenty of pubs in Pontnewydd village, along with bus stops and a train station, so the chances of finding someone new who might know where she was would have seemed fairly good.

Finally, at 9:45 am the next morning, he went to report Sylvina missing, presumably at Richmond Road police station, which is now the site of Russell House retirement flats. Afterwards John went home and, restless, searched the house again, including the 'boxroom' (small bedroom) which was mainly used for storage. Noticing something out of place, John lifted up the long sheets on the bed and was soon back out on the street, meeting up with a police sergeant who was on his way to make enquiries about Sylvina's disappearance.

He'd found her, John told him, almost in tears.

Under the bed.

--

The sergeant was soon joined by more police, along with Home Office pathologist, Professor J M Webster. Under the leadership of DI R Atkins of Monmouthshire CID they carefully explored the crime scene.

Sylvina's body was partially clothed in stockings, shoes, and a plastic raincoat. Her head was covered with several items of clothing, and lay in a pool of blood. There were splashes of blood on her clothing and the walls, bloody footprints on the floor which didn't match any of the shoes in the home, and police were able to lift a bloody fingerprint from the black handbag found beside the body

Police outside 11 Wayfield Crescent.
The pathologist confirmed her head injuries - consisting of 12 individual splittings of the scalp inflicted by a heavy spanner found at the scene - could have caused death. But so could the three stab wounds to the chest, with one passing through the heart, made by a dagger. (The weapon was later identified as a knife belonging to Sylvina's son, Anthony.) Then again, he also ruled that she could not have survived the 11 inches plus of child's tunic sleeve which had been violently forced down her throat as a gag. Her other injuries included manual strangulation marks to the throat, a broken nose, two black eyes, bloodied lips, and expanses of bruising.

Sylvina's watch had stopped at 4:30pm, and the pathologist determined the likely time of death was shortly before 4pm. A rolled up, unused condom was found on her left thigh.

John Parry, the obvious suspect, was quickly ruled out when his alibi was proven. Police quickly turned to house to house enquiries which revealed details of Sylvina's life John hadn't known. Curious neighbours had often observed Sylvina leading another man into the house, when her husband was at work. It wasn't long before one put a name to the face: Cliff Wills.

The Truth Outs

Police went to speak to Cliff at his home in the afternoon of Wednesday June 9th. He was still in bed, asleep, and when they pulled back the bedclothes it was to find him still dressed in a blood stained shirt and sporting slight cuts to the knuckles of his right hand. Sergeant D. Plummer cautioned Wills, and asked him to explain how he had come by them.

Wills claimed he had been in a pub fight at the New Found Out Inn on Cambrian Road in Newport the night before with a former boxer, George 'Kid' Logan - Logan would later dispute this, testifying they were on friendly terms and there had been no fight. Wills' story continued with him claiming that he had last seen Sylvina the previous day, stating: 'We were together in Newport yesterday and went to the cinema together. She has been mine for the last three years.' The problem was that it was a struggle to get much sense out of him. He seemed drowsy and distant, and when asked whether he had taken anything, he admitted he had swallowed between 15 and 20 sleeping tablets. He was taken first to the police station, then on to hospital where his stomach was pumped.

Clifford Wills being lead from his mother's house in police custody. (Credit: South Wales Argus)
After treatment he was returned to the police station for questioning where he made a statement:

'She told me she would be ready to go to Newport just after 2pm. I went to the Pontnewydd Hotel and had a drink. I called at Mrs Parry's house at about two o'clock, she had on a new look two-piece, which I had not seen before, we arranged to meet at the Romany Cafe in Dock Street, Newport, at 4:30 but she did not turn up. I waited a short time, and while I was waiting I saw a girl named Dolly Rogers, of Catsash Farm. I had spent the previous Saturday night with her and we were on intimate terms. I arranged to meet her at 5:30, but she did not turn up.'

Later Wills added, 'She had an appointment with someone, and I got a bit mad and decided to end it all, but I did not kill her.' He then asked whether she had suffered much and, after being assured that she had, Wills said: 'She deserved to die.'

That evening, after Inspector C Parsons had explained he would be held pending further enquiries, Wills told him: 'Our sex life was perfect. If I did not go to her, she would come to me.' During the journey by police van to Pontypool station, Detective Constable Brinley Wheatstone alleged that Wills said to him: 'What does it feel like to be sat by a killer? You have got your man.'

Sergeant Albert Cooke said Wills told him: 'I have known Mrs Parry about three years, ever since I was demobbed. We became very intimate and lived for one another. She had everything a person could have, a home and a husband. She was very friendly with my mother. I tried, but could not break the association. For three years we lived in the same world...'

He went before a magistrate at Pontypool on July 1st and was committed for trial during the autumn assizes at Newport.

Justice

Wills maintained his innocence both during and after the trial, but the evidence against him was strong.

Laboratory testing carried out by Emlyn G. Davies, the senior scientific officer at Cardiff Forensic Lab, had determined that the blood on his shirt matched Sylvina's blood group, and the shoe prints in the boxroom were a perfect fit to Wills'. More damning still was the matching of Wills' fingerprints to those found on Sylvina's handbag and the bathroom walls. Police hypothesised that Sylvina had been changing out of her work clothing when Wills knocked on the door. Quickly throwing on the rain mac, she answered, and the two went on to have consensual sex. It was after this that Wills attacked Sylvina and left her for dead, pausing only to hastily attempt to hide the body under bed.

[Local folklore maintained that after murdering Sylvina, Wills went drinking in Pontnewydd pubs, where he drunkenly confessed to people and tried to avoid John Parry who was out looking for his wife. No idea how much truth is in that part of the tale! ETA: Apparently so; Wills told police he came back from Newport after his 'set-to' with Kid Logan, went to the Pontnewydd Hotel, then from there to his house where he took between 15 and 20 sleeping tablets.]

Then (c. 1960) & Now shots of the Pontnewydd Hotel on Commercial Road, from the South Wales Argus.
It emerged that Wills and Sylvina's affair had lasted some three years, and that Wills had apparently been struggling with some kind of mental struggle since the spring of 1947. Dr. F. T. Nolan of Pontnewydd testified to the fact at Wills' trial, explaining that he had complained of melancholia leading to suicidal tendencies in December '46, and was examined by consulting staff at the County Mental Hospital. They recommended electrical therapy treatment, but Wills refused it. In 1947 Wills attempted suicide by cutting his wrist with a razor blade, but was not deemed sufficiently ill to be certified.

The trial was held on November 9th 1948, with Mr A. J. Long, KC, arguing for the defence that Wills did not know what he was doing at the time of the offence. The judge, Mr Justice Hallet, summed up for over an hour, advising the jury that Wills' mental health was the concern of professionals - in direct contrast to Long's statement that: "Sometimes the idea gets abroad that you must have medical evidence and experts to say that this man was insane in that sense, but I venture to suggest that that is not the law of this country. You are entitled to say, without a shred of medical evidence, that this man, when he did it, was afflicted by a mental disease and did not know what he was doing."

Justice Hallet explained: "The state of your [Wills'] mind will be the subject of further enquiries, as it always is in such cases, but there is only one sentence which can be passed on you according to law. ... In this country, rightly or wrongly, human life is regarded as something which should be protected by law, and it has never been thought right that the accused person should readily escape his responsibility by saying, 'I must have been mad.' If a man knows he is killing a woman, where is there any scope for saying he does not know the nature and quality of his act?"

The jury found Wills guilty after deliberating for less than half an hour and he was duly sentenced to death. At the beginning of December the Home Secretary announced his decision that there were no sufficient grounds for his interfering in the verdict on December 1st, meaning that Wills was duly hanged at Cardiff prison just over a week later, on December 9th 1948. The execution was carried out by Stephen Wade, assisted by H.W. Critchell; it was Critchell's final execution.

Wills' body was buried in the prison grounds, before eventually being dug up along with five others to make way for a new cell block in 2003.



Sources:
 - July 17th 1948 edition of the Perth Mirror.
 - Western Mail accounts of the trial.
 - Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Newport - Terry Underwood. (2004)
 - Afternoon Tryst Turned Deadly - The Citizen Record. (19 March 2014)
 - FindmyPast / Ancestry records.